Part 3
The apple trees came first.
She had seen them from the bottom of the pasture every day for ten years, six gray shapes in a crooked row across the slope, but she had never stood among them. Up close their bark had split and peeled away in long curls. The limbs she touched weighed nothing, like wood that had washed up on a riverbank. On the third tree, from a broken stub at shoulder height, a galvanized bucket hung by its bail. It was Dennis’s. She knew the dent in its side because he’d backed the truck into it their first summer and refused to throw it out.
Above the trees, in a pocket under the uphill ledge, Jace knelt in a drift of dead oak leaves beside a round steel stock tank. It was eight feet across and set halfway into the slope, its rim crusted white, its belly packed with leaves and packrat sticks. He had dug out one side with his bare hands. As Deb came up, Pie lifted a forefoot and struck the rim once, the same hollow clang, then put her head back down in the hole Jace had made. She was licking a rusted metal arm that jutted from the uphill wall. She ran her tongue up it, then mouthed the end, over and over, with her eyes half closed.
“Straight here,” Jace said. “I opened the gate at six-thirty and she walked past me like I was a post. Didn’t stop once, didn’t go around anything she didn’t have to. I’ve been digging since.”
“I told you no.”
“You told me no while you were standing there.” He sat back on his heels. “Mom, Dad’s bucket is still hanging in that tree. Did you know that?”
She hadn’t. She hadn’t known any of it. Dennis had told her, the summer of the drought, that the seep up the draw was quitting and he’d haul water to the trees until the rain came back. She’d been on the route nine and ten hours a day that summer. The trees had been his, as the route was hers.
He came down at night with his shirt soaked through and his bad knee swollen, and he sat on the porch with a bag of frozen peas on it and told her about a new leaf he’d found on the fourth tree. The rain didn’t come back that year or the next. The second fall he quit going up, and the trees quit with him. Two years after that, he was gone.
“He called it the seep,” she said.
“This isn’t a seep.” Jace reached past the mare and tapped the rusted arm. “Seeps don’t come with a float valve.” He showed her a two-inch steel pipe coming out of the uphill bank behind it, threaded into a union someone had painted red a very long time ago. Then he walked her around to the downhill side, where a smaller pipe left the tank through the wall and ran a few feet into a shallow trench furred over with cheatgrass. The trench went straight down the slope to the apple trees.
“Somebody plumbed this,” he said. “Water came in that side from up there.” He pointed up the draw toward the ridge, where the Selden fence posts marched along the skyline. “When the tank was full, the extra ran out this side and down to the trees. For years. Dad wasn’t watering a seep. He was watering what used to come out of a pipe.”
Deb laid her palm on the inlet. It was dry and cool and gritty with rust. She thought of Dennis on this slope with a bucket in each hand and the grade pulling at his knee, carrying water past a pipe he’d taken for junk, up to trees that had been drinking from it for forty years. She thought of Ardith in her mis-buttoned cardigan. There’s always been a top tank.
She sat down on the rim. Jace said nothing, which she would remember later as one of the kinder things he did that summer. After a while she lifted Dennis’s bucket off the stub and carried it down the hill. Pie followed them with nothing to drink, stepping in their tracks.
Two days later, Curt Selden was waiting at his own mailbox when she pulled up.
In all the years she’d served that box, he had never once been standing at it. The lodge got plenty of mail, bridal magazines and linen catalogs and invoices, and a kid from the front desk walked down for it at four. Today Curt leaned on the post in a pressed shirt with an envelope in his hand, and he passed it through her window before she could pass him anything.
“Hand delivered,” he said. “Figured you’d appreciate that, in your line of work.”
It was an offer for fourteen acres: the draw, from her upper gate to his fence line, thirty-eight thousand dollars cash. He talked while she read. She couldn’t hay that ground or graze it, he said. It was oak brush and rattlesnakes. He’d been thinking about two or three small hunting cabins up there for his fall guests. Thirty-eight thousand would carry her hay through spring with plenty left.
“Nobody else will pay you a dime for that draw,” he said. “I’m only doing it because it butts up against me.”
“It’s butted up against you for ten years.”
He smiled. “Took me a while to get the idea.”
She told him she’d think about it, and she meant it, which frightened her more than the offer did. Thirty-eight thousand dollars was eleven horses through winter and a new well pump besides. She drove the rest of the route with the envelope on the passenger seat and didn’t open it again.
That night her alarm went off at two. She walked out with the flashlight, switched the hose, and stood waiting for the well to cough. Up on the bench above the black slot of the draw, the lodge lights were still burning: the cabins, the long dining hall, and the string of white bulbs around the pond where brides liked to be photographed. She drove past the sign at the bottom of Curt’s drive five days a week. SELDEN RIDGE LODGE. CABINS • WEDDINGS • SPRING-FED TROUT POND.
She remembered the postcard. In May of 2021 the lodge had paid for a saturation mailing, one glossy card to every box on Route 2, and she had cased all hundred and twenty-six, her own included. Grand opening Memorial Day. Our new spring-fed pond. Dennis had stuck theirs to the refrigerator under a magnet and joked that they ought to renew their vows up there if they ever came into money.
The pond had opened at the end of May. Dennis had first told her the seep was failing in July…
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